Collins, Nicolas

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Digital access to this material is pending artist's approval. Materials may be viewed onsite at the Goldsen Archive, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University.

My persistent concern as an artist has been the exploration of technology as an
interface between art practice and communities. Having come of age in the 1970s, an
era marked by rapid technological innovation as well as by the radical rethinking of
traditional structures, I developed an improvisatory approach to electronics and a
materialist approach to music -- building circuits that doubled as both instrument and
score, and exploiting microcomputers from the time of their simplistic, pre-Apple
origins. Inspired by John Cage's maxim that any sound can be a musical sound, I
acquired the habit of scouring the everyday world for sonic flotsam that could be put to
musical use - radio, consumer electronics, traditional instruments, recorded sound,
voices caught in conversation. My aim was never to produce a fixed arrangement of
sonic components, but to create structured opportunities for players and audiences to
experience the familiar with unfamiliar attention. The unpredictable intricacy of the
moment-to-moment interaction of players, technology, acoustics and audiences remains
fascinating to me. Today, when the dominant image of computer technology is one of
bringing the wide world into private homes, I still enjoy bringing live voltage and live
performers together with live audiences.

Recent Submissions

In Los Primos (Cousins), an unlimited number of performers participate in the
evolution of a perennially unfinished musical composition. It is at once an instrument, a
recording, a score, and an experiment in the musical ...